We are blessed.
We who have been created in God’s image. All the people of the earth have been blessed by God through Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12.
Some may talk of original sin, but in so many ways, it is original blessing that we should talk about. For this is what God wants for us. Blessing. Abundant life.
It is also what we should give one another. For Blessing & Hope is what God intends.
As the Psalmist says (in one translation):
How blessed are those who reject the advice of the wicked, don’t stand on the way of sinners or sit where scoffers sit! Their delight is in the law. They meditate on God’s law of love, day and night.
Such focus on God and what God has given us through his love, is the blessings we give to one another and to ourselves.
(Psalmist) They are like trees planted by streams — they bear their fruit in season, their leaves never wither, everything they do succeeds. For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.
The way of the blessed is not like the wicked or sinners, or scoffers. The Lord watches over us and call us to live God’s love in our lives. We are blessed and bear much fruit in our lives. But such blessing goes deeper than we even realize.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus on the plain, offers healing to all who come. A great crowd of disciples and others, from Jerusalem & Judea and from the coast: Tyre & Sidon. Jew and Gentile alike. All who came to him looking for healing.. And Jesus talks about blessing…
Blessed are you who are poor, who are hungry now, who weep now, when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man…
Jesus turns our ideas of blessing upside down. The poor, the hungry, those in mourning and the persecuted – you are blessed. Why? Because those who are poor, hungry, mourning, persecuted know this is not how life should be.
“God has a preferential love for the poor not because they are necessarily better than others, morally or religiously, but simply because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God’s will. The ultimate basis for the privileged position of the poor is not in the poor themselves but in God, in the gratuitousness and universality of God's agapeic love.” (Gustavo Gutierrez, “Song and Deliverance”)
Why are they blessed? Because it is God’s will and God’s love to give such blessing.
And Jesus takes the beatitudes a step further, woe to the rich, the full, the foolish who are laughing, and those who are flattered with approval – they have received all that they will get…
It is God’s judgement on our selfish and sinful ways. The woes call us to repent of our wrongs and to rearrange our lives. To prioritize the love of God in the reordering of our days, to live into God’s blessing.
She once saw her life as an uninterrupted line from birth to decline. She had married and given birth to a wonderful little boy, Zach, and was teaching at the divinity school of a major university. The next part of the plan was to achieve tenure, master the Russian language, and watch Zach grow up. She called it “pragmatic determinism.”
But after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of 35, time no longer pointed to the future. Time was a “loop”: start treatment, manage side effects, recover, start treatment again. She now lived “in the present.” The sicker she became, the more “hope” was a word that pointed to the unbearable: a husband and child left behind, an end without an ending.
Kate Bowler is an associate professor at Duke Divinity School. She tells the story of her sudden and unexpected confrontation with her mortality in her best-selling book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. In a New Year’s essay in The New York Times [December 30, 2018], she writes of her struggle to find tangible reasons to hope:
“Approaching the new year, I wondered how I might renew hope for a future I can no longer see. So I rummaged around for inspiration in well-used daily planners and to-do lists, only to discover a stack of cards I had intended to mail long ago. Thank you for reintroducing me to tuna casserole. Thank you for inviting Zach to make a maze out of boxes. Yes, my dog often licks the television and thank you so much for taking him. There were photos that friends had hung by my bed of our last (surprisingly violent) round of Mennonite board games and of my misguided attempt to take my cello Christmas caroling. Someone had framed an image of Zach, grinning on my lap, my chemotherapy fluids hidden by a series of elaborate sock puppets we had created.
“The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has in fact taught me to live in the moment. But when I look at these mementos, I realize that I am learning more than to seize the day. In losing my future, the mundane began to sparkle. The things I love — the things I should love — become clearer, brighter. This is transcendence, the past and the future experienced together in moments where I can see a flicker of eternity.
“So instead of New Year’s resolutions, I drew up a list for 2019 of experiences that had already passed: a record not of self-mastery but of genuine surprise. 1. My oncology nurse became a dear friend. 2. Even in the hospital I felt the love of God. 3. Zach is under the impression that I never get tired. These are my small miracles scattered like bread crumbs, the way forward dotting the path behind me.”
Kate Bowler’s perspective of time and the direction of her life have been turned upside down. Life’s meaning is not something to be fulfilled at some future point but is realized now; hope is to be found in the present, in every day joys that suddenly become miracles.
In today’s Gospel, Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus turns upside down our own understanding of power and wealth, of joy and fulfillment. Jesus challenges everything our me-first, bottom-line-centered culture holds dear. Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain articulates what blessing is all about through a new vision, a new attitude in approaching life.
It is a vision and attitude that Kate Bowler has come to embrace in her life: the treasure of life and time itself, the hope that can be realized in compassion and generosity, the fulfillment that is experienced in freeing ourselves from the pursuit of the things of this world so as to embrace the small but lasting miracles of the kingdom of God.
We are blessed. May our lives reflect this glory. Amen.
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